Feds' Edict To Encrypt Hard Drives Gets -- You Guessed It -- Ignored

from the surprise! dept

Back in May, the Transportation Security Administration did its best to gloss over the fact that it lost a hard drive containing personal information on some 100,000 of its employees by putting out a press release about it at 7 o'clock on a Friday evening. Now, a few months later, it's disclosed that the drive wasn't encrypted (via Threat Level), in contravention of a White House order from last summer saying that all devices containing personal data need to be encrypted if they're taken outside secure areas. As we've noted, these sorts of edicts and guidelines are meaningless unless they're actually followed, and non-compliance brings real repercussions.